Concursion isn’t a good-looking game. There’s no getting away from that.
If you’re feeling charitable, you could describe its visuals as crude. But a more honest description would be ugly. While indie developer Puuba Games’ debut title shows plenty of imagination, its aesthetic is so immediately off-putting that many will take a single look at the screenshots on this page and give it a miss.
That would be a shame; while none of its disparate elements come together in a way that results in a truly satisfying way, at times Concursion can play surprisingly well for what it is: a multi-genre mash-up of nearly every gaming genre in existence that can see levels transformed from side-scrolling shooter one moment, to a Mario-esque platformer the next.
Before we go any further, a word of advice: under no circumstances should you attempt to play this game with a keyboard and mouse; it will only lead to pain - which as we all know leads to suffering, which in turn leads to hate. Played on anything other than a gamepad, the controls are awful - and even with a gamepad they leave a lot to be desired.
The trailer for Concursion asks the player why they must play only one type of game during any one title - and so you find your character, a generic hero-type named Questy Guy, jumping between play-styles and genres with incredulous speed, as you try to keep up with the ever-shifting gameplay mechanics.
The problem is that while Puuba games has sought to prove that multiple genres can exist simultaneously, in trying to incorporate so many different design principles at once they’ve ended up spreading themselves too thin. Thus, the platforming sections lack the tightness of control we’ve come to expect from modern-day examples of the genre such as Rayman Legends or Mario, while the side-scrolling shoot-em-up areas lack the tight design and devilishly-difficult-but-perfectly-possible difficulty curve of classic titles such as R-Type or Radiant Silvergun.
The story, such as it is, pits your character - Questy Guy - against an enemy known as Biganbad. Yes, that’s his actual name, and yes the writing is that bad. While it’s obvious that Concursion is written to sound awful (at least we hope that was the intention), it just comes across as trite. Forced, try-hard humor is not how you make a game funny - it’s how you make a game cringe-worthy. The best parts of the game, just like in the horror classic Dead Space, are when nobody is talking.
Leaving the writing aside - and to be fair to Puuba, this isn’t the sort of game that requires an engrossing narrative - and what you’re left with is a linear trek through 70 levels, each consisting of a multitude of play styles which continually keep you on your toes. And for a while at least, the constant mix and match of genres is enough to hold your interest. While none of them ever feel as well-executed or thought-out as they should, there’s just enough variety here to hold your interest. When the game actually manages to make these genre blends work, it can be satisfying.
Unfortunately, those occasions are few and far between. By the time we defeated the first boss, we could feel ourselves starting to resent the game. We persevered, however, and thankfully Concursion does grow on you - but while it’s not the truly awful game we thought it was half an hour in, nor is it one which really stands out for any real reason or makes us want to revisit it. There are simply too many flaws here, and what flashes of enjoyment there are, are soon lost to another bout of jaw-grinding frustration. There’s no build-up, no tension, and the only reward is completing a frustratingly hard level before moving onto the next, equally frustrating one.
Part of the problem is that the game shifts gears so quickly than no sooner are you used to one set of cumbersome controls, you’re asked to adapt to another. One moment you’re effectively Mario the knight, sprinting where you can, and jumping on everything else; the next moment you’re a Shinobi-like ninja who can wall-jump, double jump, and slice pretty much everything up with your katana; then without warning, you’re a spaceship, or in a Pac-Man homage, or any number of different scenarios.
One of the most annoying problems is that thanks to how suddenly these transitions take place, the action button keeps changing as your character does. While you’re trying to slice as a ninja, you’re changing into a knight who lacks a sword and simply sprints into enemies, taking damage. Sometimes your character doesn’t even have an ability worth anything, or any ability at all. The astronaut, for example, is utterly defenseless and must navigate asteroid fields using only his jetpack; to traverse slightly to the left or right, you must fire off your jetpack and pray you don’t hit one of the many insta-kill spikes littered throughout the levels. Sometimes they aren’t even death-traps until you’re unlucky enough to swap dimensions at the wrong time, when the floor can literally become lava.
There is one level early on where you must wall jump up a platform as a ninja, landing atop an extremely narrow wall with death spikes to your right. Unfortunately, the jumping arcs for the characters all feel different, and playing as one character and swapping to the other entirely messes with your brain. As a result, you hit the death wall and die. Repeatedly. When you finally avoid death on that wall, you have to jump to your left, and do the same thing again. That one section took far longer than it should have, and it wasn’t through lack of trying.
Super Meat Boy was fun because despite its notoriously high level of difficulty, you always felt as though you were equipped with the necessary skills to succeed; in Concursion, success too often feels more down to luck than anything else. As a result, success is drained of satisfaction and failure is more likely to see you closing down the game than leaving you wanting to take another crack at it.
The music will divide players into two camps - those who find it skull-splittingly irritating, and those who will find it charming and retro at first, but will inevitably kill their speakers and put the TV on in the background once they’ve died 20 times on one jump, only to have the upbeat music mock your frustration while you replay 30 seconds of game play, each and every time you fail because the checkpoints are few and far between.
With all that said, while Concursion ultimately fails in its goals, those goals are at least noble. If you can look past the fact that its graphics are reminiscent of a low-budget Acorn Archimedes edutainment title from the early 90s, and have the patience to push through all of its flaws, there is some enjoyment to be found here. At least it’s refreshing to see a developer looking at all the genre cross-pollination so prevalent in the industry these days and attempting to take it to its ultimate extreme; it’s just a shame that the end too often feels like it was pieced together from notes on the back of a napkin.
There’s the kernel of a good idea here somewhere - and on the few occasions when it all comes together, Concursion shows glimpses of what could have been a truly great experience. But ultimately, it’s a game that tries to be too many things at once, and that divided focus shows in the final result.
Concursion is a game with many interesting ideas - and we’re sure it will find a hardcore niche of fans willing to forgive its many, many flaws - but it’s also a game which tries to do too much at once, and unfortunately it doesn’t do any of them particularly well.
Nic Bunce
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